The Year They
Started Falling

A knockdown is one man's opinion

A referee cannot be talked into stopping a fight

On 22 August in Sacramento, Anthony Hernandez and Gregory Rodrigues met, and Rodrigues put Hernandez down three times — and still needed all twenty-five minutes and all three judges to win it. It is the most recent fight in this database and it is the year in miniature: men are being dropped more often, and they are not necessarily staying down. The question is whether that is happening, or whether somebody has simply started writing it down more often.

A knockdown is a judgement. Somebody watching decides whether a man who touched the canvas was dropped or slipped, and unlike a takedown or a finish there is no bell to settle it. If the people scoring got a little looser this year, the count rises with nothing happening in the cage at all. That is the first thing anyone should ask of this number, and it is the reason the story nearly died.

It can be tested, because there is one event in a fight that nobody has to judge: a referee stopping it. So measure the knockdowns against the knockouts. If men are genuinely being hurt more often, the two rise together and the ratio between them holds. If the scoring loosened, more knockdowns get logged for each actual knockout and the ratio climbs.

It held. And the knockouts went up with it. There have been 129 KO/TKO finishes in the window where the previous decade’s rate predicts 110 — nineteen extra stoppages, on a measure with no judgement in it whatever, and the highest knockout rate since 2012 at 36.8%. Both numbers moved, in the same direction, by about the same amount. That is what a real rise looks like, and it is precisely what looser scoring does not look like: generous scoring inflates knockdowns while leaving finishes exactly where they were.

0:08 The fastest of them. Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev put Julius Walker down and out eight seconds into the first round on 27 June — a single punch to the head at distance.

Pictured: Julius Walker, 7-2, the man who went down. Yakhyaev has no portrait on record.

For completeness, the window’s 351 fights ended 129 by knockout, 65 by submission, 156 on the scorecards, and one that could not continue.

Twenty-eight events, and a third of the excess on three of them

Remove the three wildest cards and it barely moves

Two down. The last one is the cheapest of all: maybe three good Saturdays did it.

The third explanation is that a handful of cards carried it. Twenty-eight events have run inside the window; if the excess lives on three of them, this is a story about three good Saturdays rather than about the sport.

It does not. The three biggest contributors — UFC Freedom 250, where all seven fights featured a knockdown, and the Adesanya–Pyfer and Song–Figueiredo cards at eight of thirteen apiece — hold about a third of the excess between them. Take all three out entirely and the remaining 318 fights still run at 41.2%, nearly six points clear of the baseline.

Four events tie on that measure, so which three get removed is arbitrary among equals; the answer does not move whichever three you pick.

What the year does have is nights like these. Three separate cards have carried ten knockdowns apiece — a figure no single event needs to be freakish to reach any more.

And the men doing it are not, for the most part, the names on the poster. Six fighters have scored three or more knockdowns inside the window; Gregory Rodrigues has four in two fights, and two of the six needed only a single night.

Forty-four fights, and an interval too wide to settle it

Nothing has shown up in the women’s divisions

Everything above is a men’s story, and it took until the fifth test to notice. Split the window by division and the two halves of the roster are doing entirely different things.

Not a smaller rise. No rise. Two tenths of a point, on a baseline that was already less than half the men’s to begin with — women’s fights have always featured knockdowns at roughly 15%, and in 2026 they have featured them at roughly 15%.

The honest caveat is the sample. Forty-four fights carry an interval of plus or minus eleven points, which is wide enough to hide a real change comfortably inside it. This is no evidence of a rise, not evidence that there was none — and only the women’s strawweight division has enough fights to appear in the table above, where it sits at 5.3% against a 15.5% baseline, the largest fall of any division.

But it does mean the sentence “the sport got more violent this year” is not the one the data supports. The sentence it supports is that the men’s divisions did.